She was allowing her imagination to run away with her. Her mother wouldn’t do that. Besides, she was through with men. To hell with all of them—except of course for Nathan, she amended. But then, he was more like a brother than a man anyway.
Kennon frowned into the small oval mirror over the pedestal sink. “Since I look like something that the cat dragged in, why don’t you go in my place?” she suggested.
Nathan shook his head. “A, you no longer look like something that the cat dragged in. And B, the client said he only wanted to deal with the owner. In case your brain is still a little foggy, that would be you.”
“Since you took the referral, what else do you know?” she asked him.
“Only that your aunt sold him the house and the man has no furniture. He wants you to furnish his house.”
There was no point in fighting this, she thought. And maybe this was what she needed, a new project. Decorating a whole house could come to a tidy little commission. “All right, get me the address and I’m on my way.”
“Got it right here,” Nathan told her, taking a folded piece of paper out of his vest pocket. “Printed out a map for you and everything,” he added, opening up the paper and handing it to her with a flourish. “Since I know how GPS-challenged you are.”
“I’m not GPS-challenged,” she corrected him. “I just don’t like a machine telling me where to go.” Kennon looked at him pointedly. “I already get enough of that from you.”
Nathan took no offense. “You know you love it.”
“Keep reminding me,” Kennon instructed wearily.
She was still thinking that long after Nathan’s voice had faded away and she had made the quick seven-mile trip to her destination. Right now, she felt like thirty miles of bad road. The last thing she wanted to do was meet a new client. But the economy being what it was, no job was too small at this point. And Nathan did say the man wanted enough furniture to fill his whole house. Hopefully, the man was not living in a one-bedroom house.
Dear God, Kennon, where’s your optimism? Where’s your hope? How could you have let that creep get to you this way? Nathan’s right. The breakup was a godsend. It saved you from making a stupid mistake. You didn’t love Pete, you loved the idea of him. Now get over it, damn it!
Following Nathan’s map, she made another turn to the right. A few yards from the corner stood a magnificent two-story house.
Getting out of her vehicle, Kennon didn’t bother locking the door. She walked up to the huge front door and rang the bell. The next second, the beginning notes of the Anvil Chorus sounded throughout the house.
Well, at least it wasn’t taps, she thought.
Chapter Two
Simon Sheffield frowned as he tried to hurry into his clothes. His alarm hadn’t gone off. Or, if it had, he’d shut it off in his sleep, instinctively attempting to escape from the annoying sound.
Uneasiness arrived the moment he was awake. The same question he’d been grappling with for the last week assaulted him again. Had he made a colossal mistake by uprooting the girls and moving here?
But then, what choice had he had? Seeing all those familiar surroundings in San Francisco had slowly ripped him to pieces. The entire city was fraught with memories for him and while some people could take comfort in memories when they’d lost someone, Simon found himself haunted by them.
Haunted to the point that he was having trouble focusing in order to function properly. And focusing to the exclusion of everything else was crucial in his line of work.
Time and again he’d find himself frozen in a moment that whispered of Nancy and all the things they had once had, all the plans they had once made. Nancy, who was the light of not only his life but the lives of everyone she came in contact with. Nancy, who was the embodiment of optimism and hope, who could almost heal with the touch of her hand, the warmth of her smile. Nancy, for whom nothing was impossible.
Except coming back from the dead.
And she was dead because of him.
Dead because his urgent sense of duty and ethics had prevented him from keeping his prior promise to Doctors Without Borders. A much sought-after and gifted cardiovascular surgeon, Simon had willingly signed up to donate fifteen days of his service, going to a wretchedly impoverished region on the eastern coast of Africa. But when the time came for him to go, one of his patients, Jeremy Winterhaus, had suffered the collapse of one of the new valves that had been put in during his emergency bypass surgery. Always a man who saw things through, Simon hadn’t felt comfortable about leaving Winterhaus in the care of another surgeon. Nancy, a general surgeon herself, had immediately stepped in and told him not to worry. She’d urged him to see to his patient, and she’d happily taken his place in the program.
And died in his place when the tsunami, born in the wake of the 8.3 earthquake that had ripped through Indonesia, swept away her and more than two dozen other people less than three days later.
Edna had been the one to break the news to him, tapping on his door the morning that the tsunami had hit, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping. Edna O’Malley had once been Nancy’s nanny and was now nanny to their two daughters, Madelyn and Meghan. She had come into his bedroom and in her soft, quiet voice said the words that ended the world as he knew it.
“Our Nancy was swept out to sea by a tsunami, Doctor.”
He’d stared at her in disbelief, then felt as if he’d been repeatedly stabbed in the gut with a rusted serrated knife.
Thirteen months later, he still hadn’t healed. He knew that if he had a prayer of moving forward and providing for their girls, he needed to start somewhere fresh and lock away all the memories until such time as it wouldn’t hurt so much to be confronted by them.
Because of her ties to Nancy, he’d almost left Edna back in San Francisco, as well. But he needed someone to look after the girls while he was away at the hospital, someone he trusted. As a cardiovascular surgeon he couldn’t lay claim to an average nine-to-five existence, and he needed someone to be there to fill in the gaps. Finding a new nanny was much too time-consuming.
Besides, Edna needed something to keep her going, as well, a reason for waking up in the morning. Simon was well aware that in her own way, Edna had loved Nancy as much as he did, as much as a mother did. And she loved the girls, as well. To lose all three of them in thirteen months would have destroyed the woman, and God knew he didn’t want someone else on his conscience.
Simon felt he already had more than enough guilt to deal with.
He had to get moving, Simon upbraided himself. It was late. Getting out of bed in the morning was still unbelievably difficult for him. Especially when, for just a glimmer of a moment, when he first opened his eyes in the morning, he didn’t remember.
And then he did.
The full weight of remembering oppressed him to the point that he had trouble breathing. But it was slowly getting easier. Not easy, but just easier, and that, he knew, was all he could logically hope for.
If he was going to be of any use to his patients and the hospital where he
